The Forgotten...: the internet is littered with histories of the abandoned, although these tend towards the violent (war, victims, holocaust) or the geographic (lair, realms, coast, frontier). The term has become media shorthand for revisiting an earlier story, an indicator that here is a different spin on a familiar tale, the evidence of journalistic skill. At the same time, 'forgotten things' are one of the most prevalent subjects online, a self-generated history that makes the past personal. Related: Secret history, Robin Stummer on the Vienna flak towers, giant concrete accretions that dominate the city yet are invisible, for social and political reasons. On flickr.

The Fallingwater Movie, a compelling case for using computer graphics to help understand a complex building. This is presumably the kind of thing Margaret Hodge has in mind when she talks of creating virtual facsimiles of buildings so that they might be physically destroyed while still being 'retained' for future generations to wander around, virtual goggles clamped to their faces, haptic interface gloves set for the crumbling grain of poured concrete.

Hodge was much derided, but perhaps her comments also made an unwitting insight into how the modern mind works. Contemporary culture exists in a limbo between NOSTALGIA and POTENTIAL. Nostalgia for the past - expressed through the consumption of (A) and the anticipation of the future expressed through the consumption of (B). We'd venture that consumption (A) is about reliving the remembered moment. It's going to gigs, museums, films, buying old books and computer games, even to bars or pubs with old friends. It is everyday activity that has at its core the attempt to recapture and recreate lost sensations, sensations that have become magnified over time.

Consumption (B) is the purchasing of anticipation, the construction of an identity based on the idealist visions one imbibes through culture and society (e.g. if I buy X car then my life will be Y better). We're now seeing the evolution of objects that combine (A) with (B), managing to be simultaneously aspirational and nostalgic. Related. Objectified, a forthcoming film about product design. From the blog it looks like a collection of talking heads trying to explain the design rationale behind modernism, and maybe even reconciling their celebrity with the increasingly complex nature of the 'celebrity object'.

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Other things. Surreal Madrid, a fine piece of abstract CGI / Gundam Architecture, Tokyo as machine. Both via Superspatial / useful collection of 20 archetypal computer images, used for scanning, compressing, modelling / le blog d'Evelyne Louvre-Blondeau is very Gallic - beautiful cartoons with frequently nsfw subject matter / Graffiti for Butterflies, 'Directing monarch butterflies to urban food sources along migratory routes in North America'. Some caterpillars. Thanks to Elliot Malkin.

I love typography, a weblog / Kottke flags up the radio wave adventures of the Judica-Cordiglia Brothers, alleged discoverers of the Lost Cosmonaut / how not to make a corporate video: 'at Volvo they worry, the Japs they just cry'. Unless this is a sophisticated example of the German sense of humour.posted by things at 23:40 / 0 comments